"I thought it was weird when you picked us to make a documentary. But, all in all, I think an ordinary paper company like Dunder Mifflin was a great subject for a documentary. There's a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn't that kinda the point?"
—Pam Halpert
One year has passed since the release of the documentary. A new crew is sent to Scranton to make a "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue for the DVD release. While several members of the staff are no longer with Dunder Mifflin, (almost) everyone gets back together for two reasons: to participate in a Q&A panel with fans of the documentary, and the wedding of Dwight and Angela. Dwight has asked Jim to be his bestest mensch, and on bachelor party night Jim decides to play some gutenpranken (positive pranks) on Dwight. Angela's bachelorette party collides with some odd Schrute family wedding traditions.
Meanwhile, the lives of Jim and Pam are in transition as they contemplate their future.
Tropes:
- Abusive Parent: Ryan, now having to care for a baby, lets him suck on a strawberry to trigger his allergy and force Ravi away from Kelly. This allows Ryan to try to get with her again. Ryan actually leaves his son behind and runs away with Kelly. The good thing is that now Nellie may be able to adopt the kid she so wanted.
- Amicable Exes:
- Implied to be what Andy and Erin end up becoming. At the warehouse party, Andy can be seen conversing with Erin and Pete, indicating that he no longer bears ill will towards them. A deleted scene shows them remembering Florida, with no hard feelings present.
- Ryan and Kelly reunite on good terms at Dwight’s wedding, before they outright get back together (at the expense of Ryan abandoning his son, who is taken in by Nellie, and Kelly ditching Ravi, who just gets fed up with the whole situation).
- While the main cut of the finale doesn’t make it clear what happens to Darryl and Val, the extended version with deleted scenes makes it clear that they split up when Darryl moved to Austin. Nevertheless, they appear to be fine with each other when they reunite, and Darryl even says Val should come down to Austin sometime.
- As Himself:
- Creed sings "All The Faces", a song written and sung by the actor Creed Bratton himself.
"I saw a friend today it had been a while
And we forgot each other's names
But it didn't matter because deep inside
The feeling still remained the same"- Bill Hader and Seth Meyers appear as themselves in a Leno Device where they capitalize on the Baby Wawa meme.
- Jennie Tan, creator of the Office fansite OfficeTally.com, appears as a fictionalized version of herself in the Q&A sequence. The script even has her introducing herself by name, but that line was cut from the aired version.
- Back for the Finale:
- Michael comes back, as a last minute addition to the wedding.
- Kelly and Ryan return for Dwight's wedding, only to run off to elope during reception.
- Dwight re-hires Devon White from the first two seasons to replace Creed.
- Meredith's son Jake, now a young adult (and played by the same actor, Spencer Daniels), returns as the stripper at the bachelorette party.
- Carol appears as the one selling Jim and Pam’s house.
- Elizabeth the Stripper makes an appearance at Dwight’s bachelor party, after a few years of being absent.
- Bookends:
- Jim originally bought the house without telling Pam. Now, she is selling the house without telling him.
- A meta example as well, as "Pilot" and "Finale" were both written by Greg Daniels and directed by Ken Kwapis.
- Just like in the pilot, Jim describes his role as a salesman. To show that his character arc is now complete, Jim speaks about his job with fondness rather than jadedness.
- Borrowed Catchphrase: When the whole crowd at the Q&A panel sees Andy walk into the room, they address him as "Nard Dog" and start chanting his trademark catchphrase "Roo doo doo doo doo!"
- Breakout Character: Turns out Andy was considered one in the In-Universe documentary.
- Call-Back:
- After failing to maintain the habit back in Stamford, Jim now rides a bike to work.
- Angela and Dwight marry, according to Schrute tradition, while standing over shallow graves, a tradition that Dwight had mentioned to exist before.
- Character Development:
- Michael has become calm, lets other people take the spotlight and overall is far more mellow by the end of the show. At the wedding, he mostly talks about his children rather than bragging about himself.
- Angela, while still having bouts of anger (mostly rightfully so), is now much more mellow and loving to her friends and her husband.
- Dwight has become infinitely more well adjusted and openly affectionate to the people around him in the office. Notably, as manager he now focuses on employing strategies to help his subordinates relax more and boost efficiency in their jobs, as opposed to his more oppressive and draconian tactics seen in his previous brief stints as acting manager.
- Continuity Nod: While everyone is celebrating in the office, the phone rings at the empty reception desk. Pam decides to answer it herself with the greeting "Dunder Mifflin, this is Pam," just like she did in earlier seasons as the receptionist.
- Crazy Cat Lady: This long-running gag with Angela gets one last payoff when her wedding is underway and the guests are seen dropping off their wedding presents. They're all cats.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: After 9 years of many things going wrong, several characters end the show with a hopeful tone.
- Michael is a happily married Family Man now, having the wife and kids he always wanted and getting to play a major role at his employee's wedding.
- Jim and Pam, having faced hard challenges in their marriage, are stronger than ever. In a Grand Romantic Gesture, Pam sells their house so they can start again in Austin, this time with Jim working for Athleap.
- Dwight is regional manger of Dunder Mifflin Scranton which is now more successful then ever before, with a loving wife, a son, an entire beet farm to his name, and two best friends in Jim and Pam. As one last show of friendship, he opts to fire them instead of letting them quit, which allows them to take a severance package he will attempt to make as big as possible.
- A more cynical example; Ryan and Kelly proclaim their love for each other once more and run away together into the sunset.
- Stanley has retired and now lives in a small, peaceful city in Florida after retiring.
- Erin is finally reunited with her birth parents and is in a happy relationship with Pete.
- Though Andy initially endures a Humiliation Conga for going viral with his crying audition in the previous episode, he reveals that he was able to land his dream job at the admissions office of his alma mater Cornell University, and is surprised to find an entire crowd turned up for the "Where Are They Now?" panel who celebrates Andy not as a humiliating crybaby, but as himself.
- The ending also implies that Nellie may finally get the child she always wanted by adopting the baby Ryan abandoned.
- Downplayed; While he was fired, now living in a shared apartment and is still hopeless with women, Toby's writing career is taking off and he finally gets invited by the Dunder Mifflin crew to hang out.
- Kevin now owns and manages a bar, and Jim helps Dwight bury the hatchet with him over his firing.
- Eleventy Zillion: New Dunder Mifflin accountant Dakota (Dakota Johnson) discovers an odd repeated symbol in the company's old financial records that Oscar explains is a "keleven", a number Kevin made up to cover his mistakes. But sometimes even keleven doesn't get the desired results, so Kevin came up with an even more ridiculous-sounding number.
- Epic Fail:
- Kevin was so inept at accounting, he often needed to use a special symbol he named "keleven" instead of a digit to make the calculations work. To quote Oscar, "Kevin used to say 'A mistake plus keleven gets you home by 7.' He was home by 4:45 that day."
- A deleted scene reveals that he would sometimes have trouble balancing his books even with the keleven, so from time to time he had to use yet another fake digit named "gop".
- Extra-Long Episode: Giving in to public demand, NBC extended the episode's timeslot from 60 to 75 minutes, allowing an additional 10 minutes of content minus commercials. However, most of that is trimmed out of the two-part syndicated version.
- Family Man: Michael, now a father, has become much calmer and extremely doting, having two phones to store all of his kids pictures.
- Grand Finale: Of the series. The final episode shows what has happened to everyone's lives and where they are going now.
- Groin Attack: Jim describes riding a bike to work as "cheaper than a vasectomy."
- Hidden Depths:
- Creed sings a poignant song, then makes a thoughtful observation in his final Confession Cam bit.Creed: No matter how you get there or where you end up, human beings have this miraculous gift to make that place home.
- Meredith was pursuing a doctorate in school psychology the entire time, and was disappointed the documentary only focused on her drinking and promiscuity.
- Creed sings a poignant song, then makes a thoughtful observation in his final Confession Cam bit.
- Internal Homage: Dwight hires new employees in the office that remain nameless and only exist in the background of the episode with little to no dialogue, similar to how the first two seasons featured minor employees who were only around to be Living Props.
- Irony:
- In "Halloween", Creed convinced Michael to fire Devon White. In this episode, Dwight hires Devon back to take Creed's job after he is ousted as a wanted fugitive.
- With Andy having left Dunder Mifflin, and now Jim also quitting in this episode, the Scranton branch ultimately did not manage to keep any of the transfer employees from Stamford in the long run.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Stanley, as described by Phyllis. She says that many people think he is an old grump, but she tearfully shows that he made a wooden sculpture of her as a gift asking whether an old grump would do something like that.
- Important Haircut: According to a deleted scene from Stress Relief, Michael had been dying his hair. This episode reveals that, now that he is a happy father (and/or under advice from Holly, we'll never know), he stopped: when he appears in this episode, his hair is visibly graying.
- Last Episode, New Character:
- Angela's sister Rachel is introduced in this episode. Angela states that they're very close, to the point that they even made up their own language.
- Erin's birth parents also finally appear.
- Deleted scenes give extra focus to Kevin's replacement, a young woman named Dakota who is implied to be Clark's new love interest.
- Leno Device: Seth Meyers and Bill Hader briefly cameo as themselves doing an episode of Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, where Hader is playing a character named "Baby Wawa" as a reference to Andy's viral crying audition.
- Literal Metaphor: Dwight's past comment about Schrutes marrying while standing in their own graves is given a less creepy context: it is a physical representation of "til death do you part".
- Metaphorgotten: Michael gets to deliver one final example of this.I feel like all my kids grew up and then they married each other. It’s every parent’s dream.
- Moving-Away Ending: Pam agrees to move to Austin with Jim so he can work at Athlead headquarters. As they are about to quit, Dwight fires them—so that he can pay them hefty severance packages.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
- Meredith states her frustration that no footage of her earning her Ph.D. in School Psychology made it on air. Oscar is also upset that they never filmed him doing origami.
- Dwight somehow managed to win back the Scranton White Pages account after Andy had unwittingly annoyed Jan Levinson into pulling out.
- Parent Never Came Back from the Store: How Ryan came in possession of baby Drake.Ryan: So I was dating this girl, and one day she went out to get a new charger for her e-cigarette. Never came back. Oldest story in the book.
- The Reveal: While there were some deleted scenes in "Booze Cruise" and "Product Recall" that established that Creed Bratton of Dunder Mifflin was the same Creed Bratton who'd been the Real Life lead guitarist for the popular folk-rock band The Grass Roots for a few years in The '60s, Dwight talking about it here was the first proper mention of it in the series.
- Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: When they realize that the warehouse wrap party is mostly about the executives and donors, the office crew leave it behind for a more intimate gathering in the office upstairs.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Creed confessed to a lot of felonies and was caught in several more. When the documentary goes to air, he goes underground to avoid the consequences of his actions. A year later, Creed has become careless and is caught on film. His final scene is being hauled off by the police.
- That's What She Said: Effectively played as a heartwarming moment, of all things, when Michael shows up to be Dwight's best man. A flabbergasted Dwight says "Michael, I can't believe you came," and Michael responds in the usual way, but slightly choked up.
- Time Skip: A whole year has passed between the airing of the documentary and this episode, which is being filmed as bonus material for the DVD.
- The Unfair Sex: This ends up getting Invoked during a Q&A session in which Pam gets indirectly called out by several questioners for guilting Jim into backing out of his job with Athleap. Jim is actually forced to step in to remind the audience that he was just as culpable for the stress on their relationship since he did so many major actions without getting Pam's consent in the first place.
- The Unreveal: Neither the viewers in-universe or out of universe ever find out what was written in the letter Jim wrote for Pam with the teapot. When asked about it, Pam decides that it is something so personal, she'd rather keep it just between them. Out of universe, Jenna Fischer revealed that the letter was written by John Krasinski to her as a farewell due to the series ending, but declined to read the actual letter, saying there are some things you just don't share.
- Voice Clip Song: Part of the In-Universe Memetic Mutation of Andy's audition breakdown from "A.A.R.M." is his "sit here and cry" tantrum turned into an Auto-Tune-filled song.
- We Used to Be Friends: Darryl makes a point of avoiding Andy when he sees him at the airport.
- Wham Shot: Jim decides to pull one last prank on Dwight and tells him that he cannot be his best man at his and Angela's wedding. The camera swivels and reveals Michael, standing in the doorway and beaming. Dwight is in Tears of Joy.Dwight: Michael...! I can't believe you came!
Michael: That's What She Said.
(They hug.)
Jim: Best prank ever. - What the Hell, Hero?: In the Q&A scene, an audience membernote calls out Pam for her poor behavior toward Jim in Season 9's Athlead story arc, asking how she could've ever doubted her soulmate. Jim steps in and says he didn't handle it very well either, while Pam admits to having been scared by the situation.
- Where Are They Now: Mentioned by name in-universe. The crew gets together again to be publicly interviewed about how their lives have been in the year since the documentary.
- Wedding Finale: The second part of the episode is largely focused on Dwight's wedding to Angela.
- You Are Not Alone: Meredith's send off phrase.
